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The central image reshapes Play It Again, Sam, Potter's Pennies from Heaven is the mainstay. The title is an Art Deco trifle ca. 1935 featuring ringers for Jean Harlow and Margaret Dumont and Edward Everett Horton—the dream realm that allows a New Jersey mouse (Mia Farrow) to escape from her drab job and loutish husband (Danny Aiello). The "poetic little archeologist" (Jeff Daniels) in the movie notices the heroine in the audience and, smitten, steps out of the screen to sweep her off her feet. "Listen, old sport, you're on the wrong side!" A pith-helmeted innocent, impossibly gallant and sweet, hiding in the deserted amusement park and wondering why there's no fade-out when he kisses the girl. The other movie characters are meanwhile trapped in a stalled plot, unable to move to the next scene as their rumpled gowns and tuxedos begin to suggest El Ángel Exterminador. A studio crisis, an actor to the rescue. "The real ones want their lives fiction, and the fictional ones want their lives real." Woody Allen's pirouette on cinema's beautiful fraud, as Godard would say, at once his cruelest and most plaintive vision. The idealized "phantom" enjoys his jaunt away from the projected tale, fights the brute, charms a roomful of courtesans, marvels at the divine hand of screenwriters. "It's one of the advantages of being imaginary." The heroine enters the Hollywood illusion and discovers its champagne is really ginger ale, "that's the movies, kid," the choice between make-believe perfection and flawed truth is invariably answered by betrayal. Fred and Ginger in the dark are cold comfort or perhaps not, the blend of enchantment and heartbreak remains perfectly unsettled. McTiernan (Last Action Hero) and Resnais (Vous n'avez encore rien vu) are admirers at opposite poles. Cinematography by Gordon Willis. With Dianne Wiest, Edward Herrmann, Van Johnson, John Wood, Deborah Rush, Zoe Caldwell, Karen Akers, Milo O'Shea, Stephanie Farrow, Irving Metzman, Annie Joe Edwards, and Michael Tucker.
--- Fernando F. Croce |